Wallace Shawn's Quotes

In an amusement park, you can go on a roller coaster that carries you up and down, or you can go on another kind of ride that whirls you around in a circle. Similarly, there are different sorts of entertaining experiences in the theater.

In my mind, the plays I was writing were extreme examples of art for art's sake. I didn't necessarily think that other people would love them, though I thought they probably would.

Interestingly, the actress who, in her own persona, may be gentle, shy, and socially awkward, someone whose hand trembles when pouring a cup of tea for a visiting friend, can convincingly portray an elegant, cruel aristocrat tossing off malicious epigrams in an eighteenth-century chocolate house.

It is hard enough to make a plan for how you are going to spend an evening with somebody else. So to make a plan for how you are going to behave in 25 years seems based on a view of life that is incomprehensible to me.

My father was a jazz listener, and I think, at least before I was 5, I was not so into that. Although there were records that emphasized percussion that I liked, like Baby Dodds.

My personal life is lived as 'me,' but my professional life is lived as other people. In other words, when I go to the office, I lie down, dream, and become 'someone else.' That's my job.

The actor's role in the community is quite unlike anyone else's. Businessmen, for example, don't take their clothes off or cry in front of strangers in the course of their work. Actors do.

'The Fever' is a one-person play. I decided I would perform it myself, and I decided I would not perform it in theaters, because the character in the play says certain things that I meant.

We're in an emergency situation. The United States has become an absolutely terrifying country, and I would hope that I could participate in some way in stopping the horror and the brutality.

When I was a child, I did always feel that people were hiding things, and that they weren't expressing their true feelings. When adults are too complicated, and cover their emotions with layers of well-intentioned subterfuge, the child isn't seeing reality clearly enough and gets upset.

When I was first exposed to the films of Ingmar Bergman, I found them frank and disturbing portraits of the world we live in, but that was not something that displeased me. They were beautiful. I thought people would respond to my plays the way I responded to Bergman's films.

When I was first starting to write plays, I quite literally had never heard of the idea of studying playwriting. I wouldn't have studied it even if I had heard of it.

You can go to a play that is enjoyable because it's funny, and then on the next night you can go to a play that's enjoyable because it's 'disturbing.'

I see myself as a citizen of the planet. Even as a child, I always found it mindless to root for your own team. I was puzzled by the fact that people said their own team was better than other teams simply because it was theirs.

We are not what we seem. We are more than what we seem. The actor knows that. And because the actor knows that hidden inside himself there's a wizard and a king, he also knows that when he's playing himself in his daily life, he's playing a part, he's performing, just as he's performing when he plays a part on stage.

Acting is an escape from the boring person that I am in real life.

And my singing, I don't think I could sing Wagner or opera, but I could probably carry a tune. I was in a musical once, but it was never performed.

As writers, we can't predict who might come along who might find our offerings valuable.

Even with my wife, I find sharing soup is hard.

I do things, and other people laugh at them. I rarely know what the joke is supposed to be or why they're laughing.

I don't have a television, and I'm just not too up on television.

I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing.

I have an enormous appetite to see life as I know it presented in front of my eyes.

I have been vain since birth.

I have been vain since birth. I expected other people to like what I did, although my vanity has definitely diminished over the years.

I have more free time than a lot of individuals, so, instead of talking, I sometimes write.

I know that I am one and I've made a living as an actor and I enjoy being an actor, but when I'm not actually doing it, I forget that I do it.

I never grew up thinking, 'One day I will play so and so' because I wasn't expecting to be an actor at all.

I never planned to be an actor. It turned out I could make a living doing it.

I spend most of my time thinking about things like laundry and buying stationery supplies.

I'm a very lucky man. It's a beautiful thing for a writer, to see people allowing your words to enter their own unconscious and their souls.

I'm being mocked because I don't live up to a socially determined view of what other people think a person should look like.

In my early 20s, I studied history and politics, and I really thought that perhaps I would devote my life to that.

In real life, every person is the leading man or woman. We don't think of ourselves as supporting or character actors.

In terms of number of movies, I've been in an extraordinary amount. If you count only the minutes I'm onscreen, it's not so long.

My plays have been strange from the beginning, and they never got unstrange.

Patriotism is considered to be an emotion a person ought to feel. But why? Why is it nobler to love your own country than to love someone else's?

The life of an actor can be very enviable.